


Crashing With the Thunder in the Sky (Falling to Our Knees, but Can We Rise)

by MYuzuki



Category: Lost in Space (TV 2018)
Genre: Do Not Copy To Another Site Without Permission, Everybody Lives, Friendship, Gen, I Wrote This Instead of Sleeping, Introspection, Reconciliation, Robot/Human Relationships
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-25
Updated: 2020-01-25
Packaged: 2021-02-19 06:29:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,715
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22406740
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MYuzuki/pseuds/MYuzuki
Summary: The last coherent memory he has is of a bright, brilliant flash of light coupled with the sharp tang of ozone.Next time we meet, he’d said,how about we do things differently from the start.(Or: Scarecrow saves Ben from the lightning storm, and Ben wonders if maybe there's hope for their friendship after all.)
Relationships: Ben Adler & Scarecrow
Comments: 13
Kudos: 53





	Crashing With the Thunder in the Sky (Falling to Our Knees, but Can We Rise)

**Author's Note:**

> So, there is a terrible lack of content for both Ben Adler and Scarecrow, and an even worse lack of content for fics with both of them together (I mean, we're talking like two fics, guys). Basically, I wanted more content, didn't want to wait for someone else to make it, and decided to make it myself. And then it turned from a tiny thing into a not-so-tiny thing and here we are! Enjoy!
> 
> [Also, because of some fanfic theft issues recently, please also enjoy a lovely disclaimer!
> 
> **Disclaimer:** This work was written for publication on Archive of Our Own (under my username MYuzuki) and is not for profit. Any re-publication on for-profit/monetized sites/apps is not authorized or supported by me. If you come across such a re-publication, please leave a comment below or message me on tumblr (@yuzukimist). Podfics and translations are welcome, but please ask permission first.]

**Crashing With the Thunder in the Sky (Falling to Our Knees, but Can We Rise)**

* * *

He's not sure how long he spends floating in darkness, caught in that murky limbo between life and death.

He's also not sure why he isn't completely dead in the first place. Human bodies aren't meant to withstand one billion volts of electricity, after all. That he's even still able to think about it at all is more than should be possible.

(Of course, he's been wrong about impossible things before, hasn't he? Perhaps he should just stop making assumptions.)

Wakefulness comes in fits and starts. One moment he's floating, drifting in shadows and starlight. The next moment, he's back in his body, feeling like every muscle and ligament has been carved out of granite, heavy and rough and impossible to move.

_Why am I not dead_ , Ben thinks during one period of semi-lucidity, but no matter how he approaches the question he can't come up with an answer that makes any sense.

The last coherent memory he has is of a bright, brilliant flash of light coupled with the sharp tang of ozone.

_(Next time we meet_ , he'd said, _how about we do things differently from the start_.

There had been more he'd wanted to say, of course. _I'm so sorry_ and _I've failed you for too long_ and _This won't make up for the harm I've done, but it's all I have left to give._

But there hadn't been enough time. He'd said what had felt right at the time, and had hoped that Scarecrow would understand. Had hoped that there was still enough of their connection left, battered and broken though it was, to let those feelings get across.)

But that begs the question: if his last memory is of being struck by a massive lightning bolt, how the hell is he still alive?

Ben briefly wonders if Will had somehow intervened, saved him somehow in true Robinson fashion, but dismisses that possibility after some muddled pondering.

Will is special, without a doubt, but there's just no way the kid could have rescued him. There simply hadn't been enough time, not with Will trapped in the Jupiter ship and Ben several hundred yards away with Scarecrow.

_Oh_ , Ben realizes, and feels a bit like an idiot. _Scarecrow._

_Did Scarecrow save me?_ he wonders, even as he struggles to break out of the hazy limbo of unconsciousness to return to the waking world.

It seems impossible, especially considering the history of pain and sorrow and broken promises that lingers between them, and yet…

There's no other explanation, really. Scarecrow had been the only other presence there in the lightning storm, other than Ben himself (and Will back on the ship).

If Ben really is still alive (and he has no choice but to assume that he is, because he's always been under the impression that death doesn't involve this much confusion after the fact), then it's because of Scarecrow.

(He's honestly not sure how he feels about that, if it's true. Being alive is good, but…not what he'd expected. At all.

Certainly not what he deserved, after everything.

He'd been willing to sacrifice himself to save Scarecrow, because he had wanted to make up for all his mistakes leading up to that point. To atone for failing him. To apologize for betraying the bond they'd formed all those years ago when Scarecrow had first crashed to Earth. To set things right the only way he could after doing so much wrong.

He doesn't know what it means, that he's alive when he should be very, very dead. That his sacrifice didn't end the way it should have.

Why in the hell would Scarecrow save him, after everything?)

He finally manages to open his eyes after an indeterminate amount of time spent floating somewhere between a state of total unconsciousness and a groggy half-aware state that dimly reminds him of the few times he's been injured enough to require high dosages of morphine.

He's baffled to discover that he's in a cave, staring up at a ceiling of sandstone and rock.

Details filter in slowly as he blinks repeatedly, trying to clear the blurriness from his vision. Eventually he can see clearly, but it doesn't really help; he's still in a cave, with nothing familiar in sight.

Well, that's not precisely true. There's something vaguely familiar about the composition of the stone of the cave, something almost nostalgic about the feel of the air, something that makes a niggling voice in the back of his mind say _you know where you are_.

_The Amber Planet_ , he realizes after a moment of contemplation, surprised he didn't connect the dots sooner. _No wonder it feels familiar_. He'd lived here for almost a year, after all, after they'd had to evacuate the Resolute in the aftermath of the fight between Will's robot and the one the boy had dubbed SAR.

(In hindsight, his current location seems a tad bit obvious. His last clear memory is of being on the Amber Planet, it's only logical that he's still there.

In his defense, however, it's surprising to wake up on the Amber Planet primarily because he _shouldn't be waking up anywhere_. He should be dead. His body should be nothing more than a burnt out husk after being subjected to the sheer raw power of an alien lightning storm.

And yet…here he is, regardless.)

He tries to sit up, and isn't entirely surprised when it proves to be more of a struggle than he's accustomed to. His entire body feels sore and wrung out, like he's run a day-long marathon after falling down a mountain. To his amazement, however, that same body seems entirely intact and largely unharmed.

It doesn't make any sense. The part of him that's a scientist rebels against the impossibility of it, because there just isn't any way that what he's seeing is true. Even if the lightning strike hadn't fried him from the inside out (and that's an impossible if in and of itself), there's no explanation for why his body remains entirely unscathed.

There should be something. Something to show what had happened, _anything_.

He finally does manage to sit up, dragging himself upright and backwards until he's leaning back against the rough stone of the cave wall. As he settles himself into a marginally more comfortable position, something catches his eye, something bout his left arm that has him lifting it up or a closer inspection.

He's not sure what he expected to see (perhaps he should cease having expectations in the first place, given the frequency with which they're being disregarded by the universe), but a fractal pattern arcing across his hand and forearm in dark lines and whorls isn't it.

_A Lichtenburg scar_ , some part of his mind helpfully supplies.

Aesthetically, it resembles his older scars more than a little; the feathery-looking designs swirling across his skin call to mind the lines of charred skin that flare out like sunbursts from the blast wounds scattered across his body, all of them reminders of that terrible day when he and Scarecrow had given up on each other.

(Ben had viewed it then as a betrayal, had seen it as Scarecrow breaking the bond between them and attacking him without cause, but…

But there _had_ been cause, hadn't there?

No matter how much he'd tried to ignore the truth all these years, Ben had betrayed Scarecrow first, hadn't he?)

Of course, this leaves him with the question: why is there a Lichtenburg scar all across his left hand and arm?

A faint image suddenly takes shape in his mind's eye as if in answer to his unspoken question, hazy and out of focus, blurred with exhaustion and pain and confusion.

Scarecrow, back-lit by the brilliance of the lightning storm. A metallic arm reaching out to him before everything goes dark.

Ben looks again at the lightning pattern etched into his skin, and wonders.

( _Why would you save me_ , he wonders.

Also _how_ , because no matter how he examines the circumstances he can't see a way out that adheres to the laws of nature.

He'd been in the middle of a massive lightning storm, and sitting on a massive chunk of conductive metal no less. That he should be dead is obvious.

Then again, he's now sitting in a cave on an alien planet, in a corner of the universe that he's woefully unfamiliar with. Perhaps different laws apply here.

Perhaps he should simply stop thinking in terms of possible and impossible, and just accept what _is_.)

He's not sure how long he sits there, staring at his arm and contemplating all the impossibilities that have led him here to this point.

The sound of footsteps, heavy and with a metallic resonance, jars him out of his meandering introspective thoughts.

He looks up, and what he sees at the cave entrance sparks something in hi chest, the sort of awe and wonder that he hasn't felt since he was much, much younger.

(He'd been like Will, once. Wide-eyed and hopeful and full of ideals.

Once, he'd looked up at the night sky and wondered. Once, he'd met an alien robot, and thought _what if_.)

"Scarecrow," he murmurs, a messy tangle of emotions clogging his throat and choking whatever else he might have said.

_It worked_ , he thinks, and the relief cascading through his chest s almost painful in h its intensity. The Scarecrow in front of him now is a far cry from the broken and battered robot he's gotten used to seeing. Ben truly can't fathom how a lightning storm could have facilitated such massive repairs, but there's no denying the truth: Scarecrow is whole now, strong and solid.

He supposes that the _how_ of it isn't really important; that Scarecrow is no longer dying is all that matters.

(Ben had wanted to believe that Will was right about how to save Scarecrow, that the boy had interpreted his own robot's wishes correctly.

But there had been no way to know for sure if it would work. He'd had to take it on faith, something he was no longer accustomed to doing.

He'd done it anyway, because he owed Scarecrow at least that much after all this time.)

Scarecrow looks at him in silence for a long moment, the lights of his face-plate swirling in a pattern that Ben doesn't understand. Finally, Scarecrow makes a whirring sound and then simply says, "Ben Adler."

Ben swallows, and nods. "I guess that answers the question of how much you remember, then," he remarks, because that's something else he'd wondered about. How much of Scarecrow would remain the same after the mysterious lightning storm repairs, and whether or not the robot would have memories of those years spent injured and trapped.

Of course, given that Hastings' idea of containment and communication had involved driving a metal spike through Scarecrow's head and scrambling his neural processes with electroshock treatments, perhaps the Scarecrow he's known the last couple years had been just a fragment of his friend's whole self to begin with.

It makes a painful sort of sense, ow that he has the time to think about it. After all, he'd first met Scarecrow when the robot had been grievously injured after crashing his ship. And not only had they not had the means to repair him, the scientists in charge of the situation had decided that coercion and containment had been the correct course of action rather than cooperation and communication.

Oh, they'd brought Ben in and had let him try out his ideas first. But they'd always pressured him for better results, _faster_ results, and even when he managed to get the answers they demanded they hadn't seemed interested in his _opinions_.

Given all of that, it was inevitable that something was going to go terribly wrong sooner or later. And it had. Ben has the scars to prove it.

But as much as it had broken Ben's heart and his faith at the time, driving him from awestruck and hopeful to cynical and jaded, sometime during the last few days he's discovered that he no longer blames Scarecrow for it.

He blames himself, and not because he was too idealistic at the time of the incident. Not because he was too trusting, as everyone (himself included in the aftermath) had assumed.

No, he blames himself because Will Robinson was _right_. He had considered himself friends with Scarecrow despite the scoffing disdain of the other scientists, but he hadn't _acted_ like a friend, looking the other way whenever Hastings pushed for more sever containment measures and harsher coercion treatments.

(He hadn't behaved like a friend should, had repeatedly shown that he would choose to follow orders over helping his friend, and so Scarecrow had stopped treating him like a friend in turn.

Ben has no one but himself to blame, really, for how things had fallen apart so disastrously and it's time he admitted that. The situation had been terrible for both of them, but Ben had had choices and he'd chosen wrong.

Up until the very end, he'd chosen wrong. Then, _finally_ , he'd make the right choice, had decided to sacrifice everything in a last ditch effort to help a friend he should have been helping all along.

He's vaguely ashamed that it took a pre-adolescent boy to knock some sense into him, but it is what it is. Ben regrets his mistakes, but there's no going back in time to change them.

At least Scarecrow is free now.)

"Ben Adler," Scarecrow says again, and nothing more. The tone of his words has shifted slightly, but like with the dancing lights of his face-plate, Ben doesn't understand the significance or the meaning. Unlike Will, whose connection with his robot seems to almost border on some sort of psychic symbiosis, Ben can't look at Scarecrow and parse a meaning out of a few syllables and a swirl of bright dots. The connection between them is too broken, and Ben doesn't know how to repair it after everything that's happened.

(Doesn't even know if that's something Scarecrow would want, if he'd be willing to try to fix that bond; Ben wouldn't be opposed to it, but he's all too aware of the fact that he doesn't deserve a second chance in that regard.

After all, he's betrayed Scarecrow before; the robot would have to be as idealistic as Ben in his youth to want to try again and Ben doesn't think he's that lucky.

Then again, he's apparently lucky enough to still be alive so what does he know.)

"Ben Adler," Scarecrow says again, and is that a faint hint of _exasperation_ that Ben's hearing?

He frowns, at a loss. "What are you-"

"Ben Adler," Scarecrow repeats firmly, then, "Friend."

He's fairly certain that his heart actually _stops beating_ for a moment, his thoughts stuttering to a halt as his mind struggles to process everything he's thinking and feeling, because _this isn't possible_. "Scarecrow, I-"

"Friend," Scarecrow insists. His facial display swirls in a complicated pattern that Ben can't keep up with, before another word comes, "Connection."

Ben's frown deepens; clearly he's still not understanding something here. "I don't understand. What are you talking about-" It clicks right as the words leave his mouth.

_Oh_ , he thinks, something that might be hope flickering in his chest.

( _I know you think what Will and his robot have is special_ , he'd said to Maureen. _I thought I had it, too, with Scarecrow._

_But it was a lie_ , he'd said, convinced at the time that their connection was beyond saving, wondering maybe if that bond had never been real at all, jut the wishful thinking of an idealistic young man.

He's never been quite so relieved to be proven wrong about something, even as he has to acknowledge that this is a second chance he doesn't deserve.)

The connection is still there, somehow. It's a pale, flickering shadow compared to the bond that Will Robinson has with his robot, but even so…

Even so, it's more than Ben could have ever asked for.

"Friend," Scarecrow says one more time, and Ben smiles.

"Friend," he agrees, and it feels like a promise.


End file.
